D&D Digs Into Its Own Past: Dragonlance’s Return and Deadfall’s Deep-Cut Monsters
It was a quiet 24 hours on the tabletop wire. Of everything the RSS feeds pulled in overnight, only two items actually cleared the bar for real news, and both happened to come from the same outlet, Bell of Lost Souls, digging into the same 50-year-old well: classic Dungeons & Dragons lore. Whatever else is happening in the hobby this week, the story today is that both Wizards of the Coast’s own creative team and the third-party publishers filling in around them are looking backward for their next move.
The bigger of the two is a Facebook post from Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the co-creators of Dragonlance, sharing behind-the-scenes photos from development of a new Dragonlance sourcebook for 5th edition. As Bell of Lost Souls reported, the images don’t reveal much beyond a glimpse of Kender-flavored production notes, but the headline isn’t what’s in the photos, it’s that Weis and Hickman are visibly and directly involved in whatever comes next for Krynn. Dragonlance has always punched above its commercial weight in fan devotion relative to how often WotC actually revisits it, and the last time the setting got a full 5E treatment, 2022’s Shadow of the Dragon Queen, it did well enough that a follow-up was never really in doubt.
If this next book leans into War of the Lance-era nostalgia the way early buzz suggests, expect a wave of “is this the real Dragonlance” discourse the moment WotC makes it official. For anyone who wants to get reacquainted with Krynn in the meantime, WotC’s Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen adventure book is still on shelves and remains the obvious jumping-on point before whatever Weis and Hickman are cooking up actually lands.
The other Bell of Lost Souls story out today is smaller in scope but a nice companion piece for lore hounds. Arcana Unleashed’s Deadfall supplement is adding a full stat block for Szass Tam, the lich-lord who has spent decades quietly running (and undermining) Thay in the Forgotten Realms, alongside several other deep-cut monsters and NPCs with old ties to the setting. As BoLS detailed, it’s not an official Wizards release, but Deadfall has built a following among DMs looking for statted-up villains that WotC itself has never gotten around to publishing, and Szass Tam is about as deep a pull from Realms lore as a third-party book gets.
Neither story is a splashy announcement on its own. But taken together, they’re a reminder that the current D&D content pipeline, official and unofficial alike, is running heavily on legacy IP right now. Whether it’s the studio that owns Dragonlance outright or a third-party publisher digging up a decades-old Realms villain nobody else bothered to stat, the appetite for old lore hasn’t gone anywhere.
We’ll keep an eye on both threads as they develop, and expect more concrete details on the Dragonlance sourcebook once WotC is ready to talk about it officially.
Featured image: “3/52 – Dice Tower” by Skakerman (Archive), licensed BY (via Openverse). Source.
